Computers have now become an integral part of our society both in business and in residential settings. Almost every business of sufficient size in Germany, the United States, and other developed countries have one or more computers to assist them in running their businesses. Similarly, many families in those countries now have computers at home that are used to run various applications including games.
Some attribute the popularity of the computers to the Internet. The Internet provides people with a ready access to vast amounts of data. Many people now get their news, sports, stock, entertainment, and other information primarily from the Internet. Businesses have also embraced the Internet. The Internet provides the opportunity for computers to communicate instantly with other computers or individuals. Business processes that were once restricted to intranets and their users are now moving to the Internet. Accordingly, companies are moving more and more of their data to electronic forms. In addition, companies have amassed huge amounts of data in an effort to understand their business, improve performance, and build stronger employee, customer, and partner relationships.
Today distributed computing systems are widely used by various organizations to accommodate the ever-increasing demand for the computer resources from consumers and businesses alike. In a distributed computing system, nodes (e.g., computers, processors, servers, etc.) are grouped or clustered to perform certain functions. Generally, a cluster is a collection of computer nodes that work together to perform a function, so that in many respects the cluster can be viewed as a single computer. The nodes of a cluster are usually coupled by a network, such as the Internet or an intranet. The cluster may be managed either statically (i.e., static cluster management) or dynamically (i.e., dynamic cluster management).
A static cluster is a group of application servers that participate in some form of workload management. With a static cluster, the application servers that are in a cluster are static, and once defined, all the application servers in the cluster are usually started or stopped all at once. In short, the application servers are statically assigned to a specific cluster of nodes.
In contrast, dynamic clusters are controlled by autonomic controllers (or managers) that optimize the performance of the cluster. Moreover, a dynamic cluster can start and stop individual instances of application servers as required. A dynamic cluster may also dynamically balance the workloads of the nodes of the cluster based on performance information collected from cluster nodes. Consequently, dynamic clusters optimize the use of the processing capabilities of the nodes (i.e., computers) in the clusters. When compared to a single computer or even a static cluster, the dynamic cluster may provide increased performance and overall lower total cost of ownership by better utilizing the existing processing capabilities of the cluster.
Whatever the type of distributed computing system being used, distributed computing systems require monitoring systems to monitor nodes in the system. To that end, there continues to be a need to develop mechanisms to monitor distributed computing systems.